Taming the Wild Beast : Birds of an Exotic Feather Need Understanding, Manners

Benay Karp’s two guests from Guyana clearly weren’t happy about being in her home.

Perched in the corner of an empty room, both visitors hissed menacingly when she looked at them and let out bloodcurdling screams when she stepped in their direction. But Karp, obviously accustomed to such rude behavior, was not surprised.

“Just give me a few days with them and you won’t even know them,” she said, turning her back to her shrieking house guests. “In no time, they’ll be a joy to have around.”

Her optimism was based on experience. As owner of Tame Exotic Birds, an 8-year-old business she runs out of her North Hollywood home, Karp has transformed hundreds of wild and ill-mannered exotic birds into pets their owners can be proud of.

Surrounded by as many as 20 cockatoos, macaws and exotic parrots (all in cages) at one time, the 27-year-old animal trainer works with the birds several times a day--talking to them, handling them or gently squirting them with water if they try to bite--until she has won their confidence.

“Exotic birds are starting to take on dogs and cats in terms of popularity, but there’s not a lot of information,” Karp said. “People plunk down hundreds or thousands of dollars and then assume that if they can train a dog to sit, they can tame a wild bird. But after awhile, the bird gets too obnoxious to have in their home and they can’t stand it anymore. That’s when they either sell it or start looking for help.”

Ingrid Rosen of La Canada Flintridge, who bought a yellow collar macaw last year for $600--a sum considered inexpensive by many, since some exotic birds can cost as much as $20,000--considered doing the former. “He was very high-strung and nervous when I got him, but I thought I could work with him. Instead, he actually got worse,” Rosen said. “I finally made up my mind to sell him to a breeder because he was so awful.”

When a friend suggested she take the bird to Karp, Rosen’s thoughts were somewhere between a wing and a prayer. Within a few days, though, the bird left his former personality far behind. “He’s affectionate now, he walks right onto my arm, and he’s fun to have around,” Rosen said. “He’s a completely different pet.”

For Stephen Kaplin of Woodland Hills, getting help for Kona, his $1,300 blue and gold macaw, was a medical necessity. “Every time I tried to take him out of the cage, he bit me severely,” Kaplin said. “Macaws have beaks that are strong enough to break a broomstick. I had scars all over.”

Karp, Kaplin said, “was fearless from the start.” When the bird tried to bite her, she gently squirted him with a water bottle. Within an hour, “Kona was going in and out of his cage and getting onto my arm.”

Karp isn’t the only trainer of exotic birds in the Los Angeles area, but several veterinarians said they recommend her to bird owners. The price for her services? In most cases, she said, between $100 and $150.

For birds that already have learned the fundamental social graces, Karp holds monthly classes on advanced bird etiquette. Up to 10 owners at a time are shown how to teach their pet to answer a play telephone, roller-skate or mimic an outstretched American eagle.

Numerous feathered pupils, some of which can sing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” have watched their careers take flight in movies and on television.

“He did one commercial and it was fun, but I don’t want to be a stage mom,” said Becky Berryhill of Glendale, whose Amazon gray parrot rolls over, waves one foot and gives kisses on request. “I’d just like him to learn new things,” she added. “They make him more human.”

Although Karp prefers to focus on her success stories, she knows that there have been, well, mishaps. One elderly woman, she recalled, bought a cockatoo for several thousand dollars and then tried for months to teach it to talk. After she gave up, she brought the bird to Karp’s home.

Several nights later, Karp said, she was walking through her dark living room when she stubbed her toe. She yelled an unprintable word.

“Sure enough, that was the one word the bird learned,” she said, smiling somewhat sheepishly. “Needless to say, this little old lady wasn’t very happy when she came to get him and that’s how he greeted her.” (There was no charge for the training.)

How do exotic birds learn to talk? Often, Karp and owners say, it is a random selection of words and phrases they like the sound of. Several studies have found that the intelligence and temperament of many exotic bird species is comparable to a 3-year-old child’s, said Dr. Robert Clipshan, a Simi Valley veterinarian. Many birds can have vocabularies of more than 300 words.

“And, just like a 3-year-old, they sometimes say things they shouldn’t,” said Azi Cohen, manager of It’s a Dog’s Life, a pet store in Studio City that allows customers to finance exotic birds the way they would an expensive car. “One woman came into the store and one of our birds said, ‘You’d be cute if you weren’t so fat.’ ”

Cohen didn’t make a sale that day.

Not all exotic birds are hostile or aggressive because they lack proper training. Some, pet store owners say, have been abused or mistreated in the past.

One pet store owner remembered a parrot that had been chased by children with a stick and then spray-painted green. Another pet store owner said a cockatoo, worth close to $3,000, had been plucked of its wing feathers by an ignorant owner who didn’t want it to fly away.

Other birds, breeders and pet store owners say, have been smuggled from Mexico, South America, Africa or Australia into the United States--where a pair of some species, such as the endangered hyacinth macaw from Brazil, can bring as much as $60,000 on the black market.

Customs officials work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to halt the smuggling of exotic birds, but the problem is still widespread. “Los Angeles is a major bird import center and a lot of wildlife gets through illegally,” said Mike Osborn, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service inspector. “It’s a big problem.”

Of the about 200,000 exotic birds smuggled into the country each year, Osborn said, three out of four will die of disease or during transport. Each year, he added, about 800,000 exotic birds are imported legally into the United States. Two-thirds of them die before they arrive at a pet store.

“I’ve had men drive up in a van and ask me if I wanted to buy some birds they had in the back, and it was obvious they had been smuggled,” said Brenda Seymore, manager of Discount Bird Supply in Canoga Park. “If people buy a bird like that because they think they are getting a good price, there’s no way of telling what they’ll get.”

Exotic birds that have been legitimately bred always have an identifying unbroken band around one foot, Cohen said.

But for owners who simply have ended up with an ill-mannered or wild bird that hasn’t quite adjusted to culture shock, help is available. “Usually, you just have to convince them that you don’t want to eat them,” Karp said. “They’re just scared.”

Karp, who owns a second house in Northridge that is inhabited by 180 exotic birds she breeds and sells, didn’t set out to be a bird trainer. Instead, she said, it began as a lark.

As a child growing up in Long Island, Karp said, she had several pets, including a ferret, a raccoon and rabbits. Each one, she said, did tricks that other people thought were unusual. “I didn’t know that most rabbits don’t fetch. Mine did.”

When a friend’s mother saw how well-trained her pets were, she asked if Karp would work with her cockatoo. Shortly afterward, Karp went to work in a federally regulated quarantine station, where imported exotic birds are kept for 30 days before they can be sold. Eight years ago, after moving to California, she decided to start a bird-training business.

“I’m very lucky, because I get to do what I love,” Karp said, listening to the cacophony of birds, all trying to be center stage by singing “God Bless America” or holding their wings outstretched while yelling “Look at me, I’m an eagle.”

Karp sighed. “I really hate Fridays.”

Mackey is a regular contributor to Valley View.